Implicit processing of environmental resources in psychological resilience

Abstract

Psychological resilience refers to the human capacity to cope with distressing events such as abuse, disaster, and other stressful or traumatic circumstances. Previous investigations by using self-report questionnaires have focused exclusively on explicit aspects of psychological resilience. The present study investigated the relationship between implicit and explicit aspects of psychological resilience. We used a self-report questionnaire consisting of four types of psychological resilience scales as a measure of explicit aspects of psychological resilience. At the same time, we measured implicit aspects of psychological resilience by employing an implicit association test (IAT) that was designed to reveal participants' implicit associations between closely related people (family member, companion, and friend), and calm/anxiety attitudes. Our results showed that IAT scores exhibited significant interactions with questionnaire scores. We discuss potential links between explicit and implicit aspects of psychological resilience in terms of the availability of companion as environmental resources.